KINGSTON — Steve and Joellen Lickar bought a house on Washington Boulevard last fall, drawn in by water views and an easy walk to the ferry. They figured they’d fix up the property and perhaps sell it in a few years when the housing market turned around.

“I guess nature had other plans,” Steve said.

The Lickars have been staying with friends in the weeks since a shift in the hillside severed their water line and opened cracks and craters on the property. After inspecting the damage, the county Department of Community Development “yellow tagged” the house, meaning the Lickars can stop by to gather belongings or take showers, but they can’t sleep there overnight. They face a $250,000 out-of-pocket repair bill on a home they bought for $330,000.

“It’s pretty sad,” Steve said Wednesday. “We sat up there for a long time after it happened and kind of cried. What are you going to do? We can’t buy another one.”

He was standing in the front yard, near a jagged hole that opened in the ground at one corner of the house a few weeks ago. Another crack stretches across the concrete in front of his garage. At the top of the home’s steep driveway, a massive retaining wall is now crooked and the pavement has drifted several inches out of place. Washington Boulevard, which runs along the water north of downtown Kingston, has sagged, cracked and crumbled away in places.

All the damage was wrought over the course of a few days in mid-March, when heavy rains saturated soil on the historically unstable hillside and caused the ground to shift. Kitsap County is monitoring the bank for movement and awaiting drier weather to make repairs, said Tina Nelson, senior program manager for Public Works.

The county put a five-ton weight limit on Washington Boulevard following the slide. That blocked large trucks, including propane trucks, from reaching roughly 20 homes at the north end of the road. The limit has since been lifted and the county believes there’s very little danger of a catastrophic slide, Nelson said.

The hillside has shifted in the past. In 2006, a slide closed the road to vehicle traffic. The county added drainage to funnel rainwater off the hillside and began studying options to permanently stabilize the road.

The Lickars and some of their neighbors believe the county should have moved forward with plans to stabilize the hillside after that slide. David De Bruyn, who lives farther north on Washington Boulevard, said he appreciates the energy Public Works has spent keeping the road open, but is anxious for a long-term solution

“I do lay this a little on the county’s head,” De Bruyn said. “They’ve had the chance to fix it.”

No ‘magic’ solution

Tina Nelson, with Kitsap Public Works, said stabilizing Washington Boulevard will be extremely expensive, if it’s possible at all.

“There isn’t a magic, simple solution,” Nelson said.

The section of road north of downtown Kingston is at least 50 years old and has been damaged by slides many times in the past. The road dips north of 4th Street, below a tall, sandy cliff. The banks shed rainwater down to the road and neighbors say there are natural springs in the hillside.

“The groundwater raises up and creates a slip area,” Nelson said. “It isn’t just the roadway, it’s the entire hillside.”

After the 2006 slide, the county added a rainwater drainage system and installed instruments to monitor groundwater saturation and movement on the hillside. It also studied the stability of the slope and identified several possible ways for stabilizing Washington Boulevard. The county landed on two preferred methods, Nelson said. One would be a large retaining wall installed below the road to keep it from slipping, which could cost between $1 million and $2 million. The other would be a system of drainage pipes that would pull excess water out of the hillside and prevent saturation.

Both solutions are complex and very expensive, especially given the small number of homes in the area, Nelson said. There’s also no guarantee either would fix the problem. The county can stabilize the road, but there’s no way to keep the entire hillside from gradually sliding. The county’s other option is to keep making small repairs as needed and keep the road passable.

“That’s a very difficult decision to make,” Nelson said.

Nelson also stressed the county’s only obligation is to keep the right-of-way passable. Stabilizing the hillside to protect neighboring property isn’t its job, she said.

The county will continue to weigh its options. Washington Boulevard residents can expect the road to be fixed as soon as the weather is dry enough to repave, Nelson said. Public Works crews have monitored the site daily since the slide in March. It’s a lot of energy exerted on a few hundred feet of road.

“We would not have built a road there today, knowing what we know now,” Nelson said.

On the edge

The Lickars may also wish they could rewrite history. Steve said he knew the property had some stability issues when they bought it, Steve said, and the previous neighbors told them there hadn’t been movement since 2006. Like other homes along the road, the house is seated on pilings dug more than 30 feet into the hillside. But Steve said if he’d known about the county’s 2006 study of the hillside, “I wouldn’t have bought it.”

The Lickars can’t move back to Washington Boulevard until they stabilize their home. Their insurance carrier won’t cover the repairs because it classifies the damage as earthquake related and they doesn’t have quake insurance, Steve said.

With the repair estimate nearing the home’s overall value, he isn’t sure they can afford to keep the property.

“It’s really frustrating,” he said.